WebMethods 7.x Development Case Study

Enterprise Title Processing System

Visionet Systems Inc.

Visionet Systems (VSI) is a New Jersey-based technology company and has been in business for 12 years. VSI is an employee owned company comprising of 850 IT professionals in 3 development centers. Our leadership employs prevalent Project Management principles to innovate processes. We use state of the art development tools to help our clients achieve location agnostic, scalable and enabling technology to support their business. VSI's offshore centers have obtained CMMI Level III Certification for IT services and processes. VSI specializes in Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) to facilitate the reuse of components to reduce development time and costs.

Business Benefits

• Streamline existing business processes
• Effectively manage outsourcing relationship with BPO partners
• Deliver 40% productivity gain with the implementation of a scalable architecture
• Manage business effectively through automation and integration among business partners
• Add more products seamlessly through this system, which will increase the revenues for the client
• Leverage analytics engine to predict when a loan closing may fall outside of SLA agreements
• Provide a rich, web-enabled business application to enhance customer/borrower experience
• Allow business users to graphically understand current state process workflows and potential issues
• Remove complexity of separate systems being used by employees and external parties
• Ability to customize processes on a client basis without needing extensive SOP's and manual intervention
• Measure and manage performance of employees and external parties
• Migrate from an individual user security model to a role based security model

Business Challenges

Developing a state-of-art application for the automation of Title, Escrow, Closing and Recordation processes was proposed to the client. During this process the following business challenges have been raised which are critical to the success of this implementation.

• Title industry business rules are dynamic and vary from one geographic area to another.
• Clients' business and reporting requirements are unique and vary from one client to another.
• Process depends on many business partners, including many vendors, demanding a robust, rule-based Vendor Management System.
  
• Design and Implementation of a location agnostic business process that can facilitate Business Process Outsourcing in an on/near/offshore model.
• Create one system that can support multiple rules for internal and external users of the system, including but not limited to employees, customers, vendors, borrowers, sellers, notaries, etc.
  
• Implementation of Service Oriented Architecture to allow for the proper governance and reuse of components to reduce development time.
• Create an agile workflow environment where regulatory requirements can be easily addressed.
  
• Develop a bundled services system for streamlined integration, built on a mature workflow system.
• Implement cost effective scalability and redundancy between multiple data centers.
  
• Selection of a platform to optimize business processes, which would also facilitate the Centralized and Complete end-to-end Development Environment from Process Modeling, Workflows, GUI, Services, Business Rules Management System, Executive Dashboards, Portals and Process Monitoring.
• Leverage AJAX to create a rich users' interface.
  
• Apply Organizational Change Management principles by moving from a human workflow system with limited automation to an automated workflow system with true human centric processing, escalation, and prediction engine.

The new application is being developed in an onsite/offshore development model. The client has partnered with Visionet Systems Inc. (VSI) to develop the system in conjunction with their onsite development team. To achieve maximum efficiency and reusable code, the development team has created reusable Service Connector Framework, Inbox, BPM Process templates and CAF Frameworks.

Coding began on January 22nd, 2007 immediately following WebMethod's 7.0 release. Since that time, the team has created and implemented the following objects:

• 900 IS Services
• 150 Publishable Documents
• 800 Database Adapters
• 20 BPM Processes
• 90 CAF Development Screens
• Numerous BPM Charts, Reports, KPI's, etc.

Innovation CAF Framework

Goal

The goal was to provide a simplified approach for creating CAF screens, as well as promoting reusability so that redundancy could be avoided, efforts could be minimized and changes could be accommodated easily.

Usability

Users now have to perform the following steps in order to create a CAF Screen:

1. Define a screen entry in screen configuration file.
2. Create a specific Screen Class extending the generalized framework Screen Class and associating a Data Object.
3. Create View.

Business Activity Monitoring

Optimization of Processes provides ability to monitor the current status of Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) employing a very friendly user interface. “What's happening now” will provide current statistics to upper management to quickly address problems and aid in decision making. The application imports the Analytic Portlet pages directly into its own frames and style so business users can access this information directly using the same application without going to MWS.

Business Process Management

Considering our client's extensive workflow oriented requirements so that hundreds of business processes can run concurrently, WebMethods BPM suite proved to be the ideal solution. It's intelligent Task Rules (assignment, change and filter) provides real time distribution of tasks among users which previously impeded the client's demanding productivity goals. Aside from the usual business processes, the application also uses special error handling queues which allow the helpdesk to receive notifications so that issues can be resolved in a timely manner. The application also uses the Task Engine APIs to complete, delegate, suspend and resume tasks directly within the code. The task expiration and escalation techniques will make the supervisors' jobs much easier.

Service Connector Architecture

Development Approach

The new application is being developed with an onsite/offshore development model. The client short listed three vendors and partnered with Visionet to develop the system. To achieve maximum efficiency and reusable code the development team has created reusable Service Connector Framework, Inbox, BPM Process templates and CAF Frameworks. Coding began on January 22nd, 2007 immediately following the WebMethod's 7.0 release. Since that time, we have created and implemented the following objects:

• 900 IS Services
• 150 Publishable Documents
• 800 Database Adapters
• 20 BPM Processes
• 90 CAF Development Screens
• Numerous BPM Charts, Reports, KPI's, etc.

Goal

The goal was to make an architecture which provides a generalized, simplified and single invocation point for all IS services in an application.

Usability

Users now have to perform the following steps in order to execute an IS Service:

1. Define a service entry in service configuration file.
2. Provide implementation of Service Parameters (Inputs/Outputs).
3. Invoke Service Handler to invoke the service.